What You Become
by riotingskye
Summary: "Good people don't just leave like you did" - Character study of the freelancers, post downfall
1. Cause and Effect

You are Agent Connecticut, member of Project Freelancer.

They call you Connie.

You're a super, bad-ass space warrior with awesome friends.

You're a traitor.

You work for Charon.

He calls you Connie. You _only_ let him.

Washington and Carolina and Tex and North and South, none of them are allowed to call you Connie. It's C.T. It's less personal.

It hurts less.

You are Agent Connecticut.

You love _them_.

You _love_ him.

You work for Charon. You're a traitor to Project Freelancer and your friends.

 _They're going to kill you one day._

One day your friends are going to chase you down with guns and knives for something you're going to do and there's nothing you can do to stop it, you can only prepare and be ready.

You cut off connections, you let the space grow so maybe, just maybe, it'll hurt less. They'll be less willing to save you, more capable of killing you because you do not want to be saved. You only want to run away.

Maybe they'll be merciful and make the choice for you, catch you before you leave and end your life then and there. That might just be easier, but it wouldn't be right, would it?

Can you really be blamed for innocent lives if you're already dead for trying to save them?

You'd like to think so, but guilt that eats away at your guts tells you that you have to live for them and get out of here.

Out of Freelancer.

You don't get to be a bad-ass space warrior any more.

You're just a traitor now.

Just Connie.

Not Agent Connecticut.

 _You're gone._

You don't exist so much now.

You don't know who or what you are, all you know is that you're trying to do something right, something good.

You feel as though you have something that you need to atone for.

Maybe there's blood on your hands, hidden beneath those leather gloves you use to strangle and murder.

Maybe you're bathing in the blood of your friends.

Maybe you're drowning in it.

You don't know what's what any more, only that you have to act and react and just keep stepping on, trying to do the right thing.

You've lost who you are in this endless grey mass of morality, but you're trying to find the shell of it.

You know it's in there somewhere.

You know you're in there somewhere, all too ready to die for the sake of trying to be good.

No one will listen to you.

No one understands what it is you're doing. What you've done.

No one gets what it is you're sacrificing when you snap and tell them to call you C.T

They think you're bitter about Connie, because she's young and childish and innocent.

Maybe they're right. Maybe she is innocent.

You, Agent Connecticut, are not.

You can never be innocent again and maybe that's okay. Maybe that's a good thing.

They don't understand that you're no longer a person. You stopped being one the moment you chose to be good over being with them.

It ripped away everything good about you, as payment.

You're just C.T. _You're not a person._

But you're trying so hard to be. You want to be a good person, not just good.

You want to be there to comfort them when you leave. To say that you never meant to hurt them, but it's for the best that you did it as you did.

The slow drifting and sharp, bitter words, the snapping and sneaking were a better build up because it gave them a reason to believe that you could do this.

Good people don't just leave like you did.

* * *

You are Agent Connecticut and you are fighting for your life.

You're fighting Agents Carolina and Texas.

They were your friends once.

You loved them once and they loved you back because you were all part of one big family of super, bad ass space warriors who fought the good fight. Or so you all believed.

Now things are different.

They're trying to capture you alive and you know that can't happen.

Texas is fighting you the hardest. She's looking to kill, as though there's not a choice in the matter.

You are Agent Connecticut and you are about to die.

It hurts. It hurts like a fucking bitch and it doesn't matter.

You're about to die because you made a mistake and tried to do some good.

Somewhere along the way it all got a little too muddled up and you turned into a traitor without a second thought and that landed you here, with an axe in your chest and fumbling hands pressing a data chip into someone who chokes on the very name you murdered.

Agent Texas has just killed you.

She made you hurt like this, and now you can't breathe, the world is fading, but as it does, everything is so damn vivid and sharp that you think it can't be right.

You're not dying.

You are.

You are Agent Connecticut

You are a traitor.

You were loved.

You are loved.

You are dead.


	2. Layers

You are Agent Washington

You're bright eyed and innocent and mean to do some good

You have killed people

You are cold and calculating and broken and you are ferociously angry

What they did to you hurts

You have a stuttering, disjointed family in your team. In Project Freelancer

You love them

You hate them

You are part of a war for humanity and its survival, which is why it is important that you live.

You're a killer Agent Washington. You have ended lives because someone hurt you.

Your family hurt you. They ruined you and your trust and now you are a broken shell of a man grasping at memories that don't belong to you.

How do you cope?

You loved them and they left you behind to pay for crimes that you did not commit. Your only fault was loyalty to a broken man who does not deserve it. He does not deserve your readily accepting, open heart to be on his side of the war.

He used you and built you up to be something irrevocably important, but he never let you know the extent of your true height.

He let you believe that you mattered.

He wore you down with his abuse and left you a battered and scarred person who continues the cycle and drops scattered threads of hurt in your wake

He stripped you of everything you've worked to become and builds you up with one resounding truth that contaminates your flesh.

He lets you embody the single fact that you were _n_

You do not deserve this.

Or maybe, because you were dumb enough to open yourself up, invited the abuse and demanded the scars, you do deserve this.

It does not excuse murder- you try to let it do just that. You make it seem like this simple fact that echoes in every step you takes excuses every bad thing you do.

Bad things happened to you, people betrayed you, so it must be okay to do the same, is that not correct?

It is a simple fact of how the military, the world, the universe and everything beyond it, works.

You remember that that wasn't always the truth that you knew.

You think that maybe the universe had been lying to you when you believed it wasn't against you.

You think that maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

You remember how there's space for two truths to jockey for a place, and they never quite beat each other away, they simply tip the scales back and forth with their resounding weight.

You discover this in some people that fall into your heart so inexplicably. You rediscover the world as you once saw it, and there are so many new colours in this field of vision.

They shift the universe for you Agent Washington, and you cannot ever, possibly tell them this.

There are not enough words in the universe to describe them.

You think that that is also okay.

You do a lot of thinking.

You spend so long thinking and analysing that you remember who you were and who you are now, side by side, and you think again of the two truths warring for space, and you feel the same thing occurring within you.

Bitterness fights with hope

Hurt fights against love

You think they are all sometimes the same thing.

You have so many people bubbling up inside you and it fails to bother you that only one of them doesn't specifically belong to the body, the armour, the grey and yellow that is Agent Washington, previously of Project Freelancer.

You have trouble picking out the person that is specifically you now, but it doesn't bother you that you don't know because you're back in the familiar territory of loving abundantly and you do it with so much guilt and horror.

You've seen this train wreck before, you know how this story ends, but you fall into it so easily, so rhythmically that it fails to bother you until you're too far down the rabbit hole.

You wonder sometimes where that analogy came from

You know it belonged to something old, something from Earth, and you think, like you, against all the facts and alterations of the truth, all the developments bristling in the atmosphere, it has survived.

You have survived too Agent Washington.


End file.
